Salute to Adventurers eBook

Every man of us uncovered his head as he rode towards
the melancholy place. I noticed a little rosary,
which had been carefully tended, but horses had ridden
through it, and the blossoms were trailing crushed
on the ground. There was a flower garden too,
much trampled, and in one corner a little stream of
water had been led into a pool fringed with forget-me-nots.
A tiny water-wheel was turning in the fall, a children’s
toy, and the wheel still turned, though its owners
had gone. The sight of that simple thing fairly
brought my heart to my mouth.

That inspection was a gruesome business. One
of the doorposts of the house still stood, and it
was splashed with blood. On the edge of the ashes
were some charred human bones. No one could tell
whose they were, perhaps a negro’s, perhaps
the little mistress of the water-wheel. I looked
at Ringan, and he was smiling, but his eyes were terrible.
The Frenchman Bertrand was sobbing like a child.

We took the bones, and made a shallow grave for them
in the rosary. We had no spades, but a stake
did well enough to dig a resting-place for those few
poor remains. I said over them the Twenty-third
Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;
for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff shall comfort
me.”

Then suddenly our mood changed. Nothing that
we could do could help the poor souls whose bones
lay among the ashes. But we could bring their
murderers to book, and save others from a like fate.

We moved away from the shattered place to the ford
in the river where the road ran north. There
we looked back. A kind of fury seized me as I
saw that cruel defacement. In a few hours we ourselves
should be beyond the pale, among those human wolves
who were so much more relentless than any beasts of
the field. As I looked round our little company,
I noted how deep the thing had bitten into our souls.
Ringan’s eyes still danced with that unholy
blue light. Grey was very pale, and his jaw was
set grimly. Bertrand had ceased from sobbing,
and his face had the far-away wildness of the fanatic,
such a look as his forbears may have worn at the news
of St. Bartholomew. The big man Donaldson looked
puzzled and sombre. Only Shalah stood impassive
and aloof, with no trace of feeling on the bronze
of his countenance.

“This is the place for an oath,” I said.
“We are six men against an army, but we fight
for a holy cause. Let us swear to wipe out this
deed of blood in the blood of its perpetrators.
God has made us the executors of His judgments against
horrid cruelty.”

We swore, holding our hands high, that, when our duty
to the dominion was done, we should hunt down the
Cherokees who had done this deed till no one of them
was left breathing. At that moment of tense nerves,
no other purpose would have contented us.

“How will we find them?” quoth Ringan.
“To sift a score of murderers out of a murderous
nation will be like searching the ocean for a wave.”